I've been covering the video game space for 20 years for outlets like The Washington Post, Reuters, CNET, AOL, Wired Magazine, Yahoo!, Entertainment Weekly, NBC, Variety, Maxim, EGM, and ESPN. I serve as EIC of GamerHub.tv and co-founder of GamerHub Content Network, a video game and technology video syndication network that works with Tribune and DBG to syndicate game videos and editorial around the world. I also cover games for outlets like The Hollywood Reporter, IGN, Geek Monthly, CNN, DigitalTrends and PrimaGames.

Why David Cage Will Help Sony Sell PlayStation 4 Hardware And Create The Citizen Kane Of Gaming

Quantic Dream founder and CEO David Cage has been at the forefront of bringing emotion to interactive entertainment. He’s spent his life, thus far, building new technology that allows him to bring memorable stories to life that put the player front and center. Unlike many games, Quantic Dream titles constantly challenge gamers to make important decisions, and these decisions take both an emotional toll on the player and spin the narrative into new directions.

Cage, who wowed the game industry at GDC last year with his short film, Kara, and again at E3 a few months later with his new PlayStation 3 game, Beyond: Two Souls, starring Ellen Page; was on stage at PlayStation Meeting 2013 to show what PlayStation 4 adds to his ultimate quest to bring as much depth and emotion to games as Hollywood has experienced.

“Getting the player emotionally involved is the holy grail,” said Cage during his presentation, which can be seen below. “We try to make players forget they’re playing a game. We want them to live the experience and suspend disbelief. But emotion is complex and challenging to capture through sounds and dialogue and gameplay. In a medium like ours, tech is very important. We rely on new technology to get players emotionally involved.”

Cage compared gaming to Hollywood, which has had a 100 year head-start on bringing emotion to audiences. Even in the early silent days when films were black and white, actors exaggerate moves to make up for the camera limitations.

“Cinema became what it is today when technology allowed movie directors and actors to develop emotion,” said Cage. “You can see into the eyes of the actors and know when they are going to cry. It’s these subtleties that PlayStation 4 games will enable in gaming.”

“When we developed Omikron in Omikron characters featured 350 polygons. With Indigo Prophecy we increased that to 1,000 polys. With Heavy Rain we had 15,000 polys and with Kara at 20,000 polys. Working with Ellen Page on Beyond we’re pushing 30,000 polys. We’ve developed a brand new engine for PS4 and it’s the first time we can bring features like translucency and 3D depth of field previously reserved for Hollywood CG films into games.”

Cage told me that while he has been developing proprietary technology for 15 years at Quantic Dream – the company has a team of 14 engineers working on the engines and pipelines — the biggest evolution in the games industry should really be about concepts and ideas and innovations design-wise.

“Technology must remain a tool,” said Cage. “It’s a great tool, but technology is the pen to write the book. It’s not the book. If you have a great pen maybe you’ll write faster or it will look better, but at the end you have something to say or you don’t. It’s crazy what we can do with PlayStation 3. We’re even surprised of the power of the console because after having Heavy Rain we said we have a good engine and maybe we could do a little bit better, but when we started working on this new engine we were really amazed about what the console can do.”

Heavy Rain has been optioned for a Hollywood movie, and Beyond certainly looks like a project that could evolve beyond the PS3. But Cage is happy with gaming as his creative medium.

“I think it’s a very interesting concept to have Hollywood talking to the game industry, but at the same time I get the feeling that sometimes they talk for the wrong reasons. They just talk about marketing. They talk about license products, they talk about how they can make more money using the other and this is not the right approach. The right approach is to have a creative collaboration. et’s talk about talent. Let’s talk about art. Let’s talk about creativity. How can we feed each other, how can we support each other? Then it’s going to make sense and it’s going to generate revenues.”

Cage said convergence can’t be about trying to make a quick buck – something Hollywood is notorious for. And one of many reasons so many video game movies flop at the box office, and movie games tank at retail.

“If a game is successful, if people play the game and in the end they think it’s really a creative experience, it sends a very strong message to Hollywood that our game industry can create great entertainment,” said Cage. “It’s possible to do things differently and genuinely work together and be passionate about something and build something together, instead of talking about money and marketing and revenues.”

The PS4 demo featuring the old man with eyes that you can look into his soul showed the potential of interactive storytelling. Cage demoed Kara before revealing Beyond, an amazing new interactive adventure that stars Ellen Page, who committed months to motion capture work. If that kind of Oscar-nominated talent was attracted to PS3, imagine the caliber of talent Cage can bring to PS4. And the types of stories he can tell. If PS4 can solve the uncanny valley, and bring true emotion to games, the industry could have its Citizen Kane. Orson Welles had to wait for technology to bring his masterpiece to life. It looks like the game industry finally has the tools it needs.

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